Twilio Announces Multi-Year Strategic Partnership With Microsoft to Accelerate Conversational AI Initiatives
Twilio to develop conversational AI solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's customer engagement platform
Twilio Chief Executive Officer, Khozema Shipchandler, will be joined by Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella, for a pre-recorded, virtual fireside chat at Twilio SIGNAL
Twilio (NYSE:TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today's leading brands, today announced at Twilio SIGNAL a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The collaboration unlocks potential for more than 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft managed customers to build the future of conversational AI and helps deliver on Twilio's vision: ensuring that every digital interaction between businesses and consumers is amazing.
Conversational AI enables computer systems to understand and respond to human conversations in a way that mimics natural dialogue. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyze and interpret human voice and text input, delivering appropriate responses through AI-generated voice or text.
Businesses building conversational AI experiences for customer engagement have run into a number of challenges — from lack of precision due to incomplete data, to difficulty scaling beyond successful pilot programs due to legacy systems integration challenges and lack of robust data infrastructure. Twilio's expertise and leadership across communications, data, and AI, combined with Microsoft Azure AI's safe, secure, enterprise-grade, and global infrastructure uniquely help accelerate conversational AI adoption across the enterprise.
"Every interaction between a business and their customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and those interactions have been drastically improved by AI," said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio. "Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers."
The two companies will collaborate on developing conversational AI customer engagement solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's comprehensive customer engagement platform that combines communications, contextual data, and AI. Product innovation areas of focus for the strategic partnership will consist of a broad range of conversational AI services, including:
- capabilities for building multi-channel AI agents for automating and dramatically improving every customer engagement;
- AI agents that assist live agents in the contact center via enhanced Twilio Agent Copilot capabilities; and
- multi-modal solutions for enhancing and improving digital interactions between businesses and customers.
"Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI including AI agents across their organization with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance," said Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. "Customers will see strong business value with the combination of Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's communications and data capabilities — the critical last mile connection between businesses and customers."
Conversational AI at Twilio
Twilio's Conversational AI solutions provide model flexibility, streamlined options for businesses to augment capabilities at their own speed, and native integrations to the leading Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) to drive more efficient and engaging customer interactions.
In addition to the strategic partnership with Microsoft, Twilio announced numerous conversational AI enhancements and innovations today at Twilio SIGNAL for businesses exploring conversational AI solutions for customer care and sales.
Notable innovations include:
- ConversationRelay (General Availability): A conversational AI capability that enables developers to create robust natural voice AI agents using their choice of LLM. Twilio seamlessly integrates real-time streaming, the latest speech recognition technology, interruption handling, and expressive, human-like voices, allowing developers to create advanced agentic applications more quickly, and with less overhead.
- Conversational Intelligence (General Availability for Voice and Private Beta for Messaging): An expansion of Twilio's Voice Intelligence, Conversational Intelligence analyzes voice calls and text-based conversations, converting them into structured data and insights that improve customer experiences and operational efficiency, at scale.
Innovation at Twilio SIGNAL San Francisco 2025
Twilio SIGNAL, held May 14-15 in San Francisco, brings together developers, business leaders, innovators, and builders of all types from industry-leading companies for two days of networking and hands-on learning across a variety of customer engagement topics.
This year's speakers include executives from leading brands such as Clear, Best Buy, Rocket, Vineyard Vines, and more. The conference will also feature a pre-recorded, virtual fireside chat with Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella.
Twilio SIGNAL keynotes will be available on-demand following the event at signal.twilio.com.
Additionally, Twilio will present and demo conversational AI solutions running on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry at the Microsoft Build Conference in Seattle, May 19-22.
About Twilio
Today's leading companies trust Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to build direct, personalized relationships with their customers everywhere in the world. Twilio enables companies to use communications and data to add intelligence and security to every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way. Across 180 countries, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. For more information about Twilio (NYSE:TWLO), visit: www.twilio.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Twilio's expectations regarding the capabilities of our platform and solutions, and expectations regarding our partnership with Microsoft.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events, the outcome of which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, including those more fully described in our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Forward-looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
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Roman Skuratovskiy
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